What is Linked Open Data?

The semantic web refers to a global collaborative initiative, led by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), to utilize standard technologies to support a “web of data” (for more information, see: http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/). The “web of data” is also known as Linked Data - data represented in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and matched to authoritative vocabularies and ontologies published on the web. Linked Data allows distributed resources to be part of a global, federated database.

GeoLink project

WHOI is partnering with several other research organizations in the GeoLink project, supported by NSF:

The GeoLink project brings together significant geosciences holdings in the ocean, earth and polar sciences to demonstrate how innovative technologies can be robustly applied to these facilities to enhance the capabilities for scientists to discover and interpret relevant geoscience data and knowledge. The project will lower barriers to cross-repository data discovery and access, while respecting and preserving repository autonomy and heterogeneity.